Did You Know You’re Devouring Filth? 6 Ways To Minimize The Damage

What You Don't Know CAN Hurt You

It’s inevitable, we all eat filth unknowingly. Today it could be fly vomit on your pizza. Tomorrow mouse hair or rat poop in your taco. Down the road you will likely consume roach wings in your peanut butter or phlegm in a big salad.

It doesn’t help that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permits a lot more revolting things into your food than you might think. The FDA has a handbook called Food Defect Action Levels: Levels of Natural or Unavoidable Defects in Foods That Present No Health Hazards for Humans. It covers objectionable matter contributed by insects, rodents, and birds as well as decomposed material and miscellaneous items such as sand, soil, glass, rust, and other foreign substances.

According to the handbook: “It is economically impractical to grow, harvest, or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.”

To that end, the FDA allows filth limits before it takes action. Some examples:

Up to six or more attached asparagus beetle eggs and/or sacs are allowed per 10 percent of asparagus spears or pieces.

Rodent hairs in your cinnamon are allowed as long as it’s less than an average of 11 rodent hairs per 50 grams.

Insect heads are OK in your fig paste if the heads are less than 13 per 100 grams of paste.

Mammalian excreta on your ginger is permitted if it’s less than 3 mg of excreta per pound of ginger.

Mildew in your canned greens? Not a problem if mildew coverage averages less than 10 percent of the leaves and the dew is less than one-half inch in diameter.

Checkers draw the line on insect fragments in your macaroni at an average of 225 insect fragments or more per 225 grams in six or more sub samples.

Frozen peaches really shouldn’t have worms. But the FDA allows a little wiggle room as long as an average of only 3 percent of the fruit is wormy.

Most people prefer sand on beaches and not in their raisins. However, the FDA allows up to 40 mg of sand and grit per 100 grams of natural or golden bleached raisins.

Rodents need to poop, too. But you would prefer they didn’t do it in wheat products you’re about to consume. Yet, the FDA says poopy wheat is edible as long as there is less than an average of 9 mg of rodent excreta pellets and/or pellet fragments per kilogram of wheat. (Not to mention the gluten or the fact that wheat is drenched with pesticides like malathion and Chlorpyrifos methyl, and is also often GMO.)

And keep in mind, while the FDA, often in conjunction with state regulatory agencies, routinely checks food manufactures’ facilities for cleanliness, and conducts analysis samples for purity, inspectors aren’t on the scene every day. In other words, the odds are pretty good that sooner or later maggots (even a number over the allowable maximum) will find their way into a batch of just about anything between inspections.

Food For Thought

No two people (much less agencies) will ever agree on how much filth is too much. However, even a little filth can be the cause of big health problems.

But in reality, “The world is covered in a fine patina of feces,” says Ahern quoting Stanley Falkow, the “father” of microbial pathogenicity.

“So we do eat filth,” says Ahern, “but the human body evolved to cope with that because we have to eat to survive, and if filth made us sick every time we ate it, we’d all be sick or dead.”

Still, it’s a little like Russian roulette. Some rounds of filth are deadlier than others. Ahern says about one percent of bacteria are pathogenic and “the diseases they cause can have a profoundly negative effect.”

Ahern says one particularly bad food-borne illness is Listeria, which causes at first a GI type of disease but in some people can lead to potentially fatal meningitis. Most bad bacteria simply makes you lose your liquids through vomiting and diarrhea, your body’s way of purging bad microbes.

“When you think about it, those reflexes only play into the hands of the bacteria, who want us to vomit and have diarrhea so that they can spread to new hosts,” Ahern says. “Coevolution at its finest.”

6 Ways To Minimize The Damage

1. Probiotics

Probiotics are microorganisms introduced into the body for their beneficial qualities.

“A proper probiotic can enhance the body’s natural detox and protective capabilities,” says Krishnan. “The body has a natural detox capacity through the liver and protective systems in the mucus layer that is coated with immunoglobulins (antibodies). These systems are controlled by friendly microbes in large part and so enhancing the presence of friendly microbes will prove to offer significant benefit.”

Krishnan says the right probiotic should be one that is guaranteed to survive the gastric system and one that has proven capability to help protect the body from damaging food.

“Spore-based probiotics like Just Thrive have scientific proof showing a protective effect on the digestive tract,” says Krishnan.

“The best thing you can do to ‘fight off’ the bad microbes you might ingest is to keep your own gut bacteria as happy as you can,” says Ahern. “ I’m talking about providing the 99 percent of good guys already down there with the food they like to eat.”

“Eating fermented foods fortifies your microbiome,” says Shanahan. “The human microbiome is complex and composed of roughly 5,000 different bacterial and fungal species that serve to protect you against pathogens. They can detect the presence of bad bacteria and can ‘gang up’ against them.”

Molecular hydrogen (H2) is the smallest molecule in existence. It is possibly the only antioxidant molecule that can reach inside the mitochondria (power generators) of a cell. Working deep within the cellular level puts H2 in the perfect position to neutralize free radicals and reduce oxidative stress. Once inside the mitochondria, previous studies have shown that molecular hydrogen exerts anti-inflammatory properties and protects from noxious chemicals (cytoprotective) in addition to acting as an antioxidant.

Staying hydrated is a key to good health and a factor in diluting filth. According to a recent study, molecular hydrogen may help keep you better hydrated. A 2012 study concluded that drinking molecular hydrogen water was an effective fluid hydration strategy for athletes. This is significant considering studies show two of three people are partially dehydrated. Even light dehydration of no more than 2 percent of total body weight disturbs physiological functions and decreases the body’s natural microbe-fighting efficiency.

6. Prepare Meals At Home

Dr. Abby Kramer, a holistic practitioner and chiropractor in Glenview, Illinois, says her best advice is to avoid processed and prepackaged foods.

“These are the types of foods that would contain ‘filth’ which can definitely wreak havoc on the body and especially gut health,” says Kramer.

Shanahan agrees, “The No. 1 thing to do is eat food you’ve made yourself from scratch.”

According to Shanahan, more than half of all the food-borne illnesses occurring between 1998 and 2004 came from eating out in restaurants, hotels, and delicatessens. An additional 4 percent came from schools and 22 percent from hospitals, catering services and civic/church buffets.

“Given that most people eat at home most of the time, it’s safe to say that eating out increases your risk of getting sick by anywhere from five to 10 times,” says Shanahan.

Thomas Ropp Longtime journalist Thomas Ropp is an environmental advocate and proponent of living healthier. After spending most of his life in Arizona, he relocated to a Costa Rican rainforest ten years ago and helped with reforestation projects to expand the habitat of the endangered mono titi monkey. He has dual residency in the United States and Costa Rica.